What Did You Do In The War?
by onawingandaswear
Summary: Tiago Rodriguez once knew James Bond very well. Time and circumstance changed that simple truth. - 00Silva -
1. Chapter 1

"I'll have a martini, shaken."

"You do realize the ice bruises the liquor, yes? Changes the flavor. You could use the finest gin in all the world, and it will taste like swill in the hands of the average barman."

"That's how I enjoy it. I refuse to justify my tastes to you."

"Fine. Enjoy your bottom-barrel drink. While you're at it, though, would you like some crisps with your caviar? I hear the flavor profile of the barbecue pairs wonderfully with beluga sturgeon."

"Sod off."

"I'll assume it was the Navy that taught you such colorful language and instilled in you your damaged taste in drink."

* * *

For several months, that is the extent of their relationship.

* * *

Tiago Rodriguez is a man who has always appreciated beauty, and James Bond is alluring in the way that only sparkly-clean new agents can be, plucked from the Royal Navy like a ripe summer peach.

Bond is older than the other recruits. A transfer. Nearly Rodriguez's age if looks are anything to go by. MI6 usually starts younger, however, idle gossip is circulating that M is grooming this one for something special.

A former Commander means a potential double-O.

Bond's only a few years behind himself in his training, so there's hope yet that the agent will mature into something formidable.

Right now, though, all Bond has going for him is his appearance, his military experience and his quiet intensity. Rodriguez gives him three months before he's scrambling back to the armed forces for a desk job.

In the mean time, Rodriguez will enjoy the view.

* * *

The higher-ups rave about "Commander Bond" and his unique skill sets.

Eventually curiosity gets the better of him, and Rodriguez takes an assignment that insults his intelligence just so he can have an excuse to engage Bond somewhere other than a London gastropub.

It's a simple escort operation that should take no longer than three days as long as the diplomat avoids running afoul of any local warlords.

Rodriguez is the senior agent, and Bond, while attempting to seem indifferent, hangs on his every word trying to soak up any information that might be useful in the future.

It's bizarrely attractrive.

Rodriguez can _actually see_ that MI6 hasn't gotten it's claws too deep into this one yet, and it's refreshing that Agent Bond still has _some_ humanity left.

But those feelings are gone as quickly as they come not six hours later.

Over drinks they end up discussing nonexistent family members and 'classified' training exercises. Bond keeps calling him 'Rodriguez' and flirts with anything in a skirt to overcompensate for whatever discomfort he feels at the less-than-ideal talking points.

Neither reveals anything legitimately personal, and the whole affair is about as enjoyable as chewing on glass.

When they retire to their respective rooms, Rodriguez amends that while Bond may have lasted longer than his preascribed three months, he will no doubt die bloody in the near future. Possibly by Rodriguez's own hand.

* * *

Two days later, when they lie panting in the bed of a cargo truck wearing bloodied suits and bearing pistols with empty clips, Bond becomes James, and Rodriguez becomes Tiago.

It's the start of something terrible.

* * *

The first time they're anything close to intimate is after James' first MI6 kill. Reportedly self-defense, nothing even close to proving Bond worthy of double-O status, but a life taken all the same.

They just sit together in the dark, faces turned to the glittering London skyline. They don't speak about what happened, and Tiago truly believes that neither will mention this night again.

"We all begin fragile," he remembers saying finally, running his fingers gently across violently bruised skin. "But we grow strong in the wake of those events that would otherwise destroy us, yes?"

He will not be a mentor, and he doesn't know if he can be a friend.

He decides to be something else.

As James shakes, Tiago repeats again, "We grow strong."

* * *

The whole event was a test, Tiago discovers later after slipping by a temp in the records office. There he learns the 'ambush' was set up by MI6 to rate Bond's duress under fire.

James apparently passed with flying colors in the eyes of the brass, but his psychological evaluation is patchy. Like someone has redacted entire paragraphs of the report. Regardless, M has since approved "Agent Bond" for "an Advanced Regimen of Desensitivity Exercises".

The program is standard procedure for advanced field agents, but certainly not yearling recruits. He'd completed the training himself several months prior to Bond's arrival after being told it was an essential step for agents desirous of double-O status.

He doesn't get a chance to pass on that "Advanced Regimen of Desensitivity Exercises" is MI6 code for medically supervised torture.

* * *

Agent James Bond goes under for three weeks with "no issue".

* * *

"We grow strong." James toasts when an extraction places them both in Belgrade three months later.

Tiago raises his glass, but he recognizes the dull shine behind James' eyes all too well.

The spark is gone. Snuffed out by whatever "exercises" MI6 has deemed nessesary in the current political climate.

That night is the first time they fuck. They don't kiss.

He instigates and lets James top initially, but the act reeks of psychological conditioning. Halfway through he shoves off the junior agent, flips Bond onto his back and everything after is teeth and nails and pain.

Bond spits in rage while Tiago jackhammers into him, the quick snaps of his hips leaving him breathless enough that he can't articulate much more than a seething '_fuck you' _every few minutes, but at least the emotion is something tangible.

They both climax quickly and neither man enjoys it. Bond too furious and Tiago seeking a reaction that doesn't imply deep seated animosity on his bedmate's part.

When James is coherent again - and substantially less disturbed - he turns a steely gaze on Tiago, who doesn't hesitate to offer an explanation with a flippant wave of his hand.

"Sometimes in this line of work, you can forget yourself."

James furrows his brow and ducks his head in a slight nod.

He's gone the next morning before another word can be said on the matter.

* * *

Their relationship evolves slowly following the encounter in Belgrade.

James is reluctant and Tiago is too busy to chase a man trying so hard to act uninterested.

Instead he takes every mission thrown at him, jetting around the globe on assignments that drag him away from London for weeks at a time.

Before long his dedication and growing apathy earn him the coveted 009 designate.

He's never seen M look so proud and it's as close to a benediction as he'll ever recieve in this line of work.

He holds a license to kill and junior agents look at him with a mixture of awe and spite as he leaves M's office.

Tiago goes to bed alone and falls asleep with a gun beneath his pillow, just like every other night.

The thrill wears off.

* * *

They don't tell you that nothing really changes when you become a double-O.

The target on your back just gets bigger.

* * *

He wakes up one morning a week after his promotion to a postman ringing him to sign for a package.

It's petrol station scotch. Offensively cheap. No note.

He chucks the bottle into the trash bin and goes back to bed.


	2. Chapter 2

Tiago can't pinpoint when it starts, the unsettling normalcy they have now, but he knows it's after something has changed for the worse when he finds James rifling through his ice box late one evening.

"What kind of man doesn't keep any _meat_? My god,"

"I've been gone for a month."

"That is no damn excuse," James closes the door and spins on a heel to face him, eyes oddly bright around blown-wide pupils. "A man should at least have bacon stashed somewhere." He continues angrily, moving to the cupboard.

Ah, drugs then.

"A disgrace to double-O's everywhere, not having sodding breakfast meats - that's the cheapest thing you could possibly have in this flat, Tiago. All this alcohol and no food - what, does medical use your piss to sterilize the sutures?"

James picks up a decorative vase from the countertop and shakes it at 009 ruefully.

"What is this even? What god awful purpose does this serve in a _kitchen_?"

Good drugs at that. Potentially cocaine, but past indicators show Bond would not ingest the substance recreationally. Decent money says he was slipped something.

"Why?" James starts slowly before going back to the fridge. "Why don't you have anything to eat?"

Tiago pulls a chair away from the nook and sits, chin resting on his palms, just watching. If he waits long enough - and if his suspicions are correct - James will get maudlin and 009 might just learn something useful.

After a minute Bond slumps to the floor holding a cheap, heretofore forgotten bottle of scotch.

How the swill came to be in Tiago's flat _again _is immediately as much of a concern as how James managed to get in past the biometrics.

"I see you got my gift." James smile is cockeyed as he stares down the amber liquor. "Congratulations. You get to kill more bad people, protect the nation from threats foreign _and _domestic." James rips the cap off the scotch and takes a swig before spitting the contents all over Tiago's Brazilian Rosewood floor.

"Ugh." James relents, slamming the bottle down beside him. "That is terrible. At least I have some fucking taste."

"Perhaps. I have yet to see it in person." Tiago says lightly, not knowing if he should commit any further to the conversation. James looks confused for a moment, and his eyes truly are disgustingly bright.

"Why don't you treat me like the others?" James asks, and Tiago recognizes the wording is off. Grammar is not helping to articulate whatever James truly means; nonetheless, Tiago has an answer. He always has an answer.

He moves to speak but James shushes him abruptly.

"No. No. I know this one. It's because I'm different, I'm _special_. 'He's going to be a double-O,'" James mocks with high inflection. "'He's going to be a great agent.' _They_ look at me like I'm a wild animal, something that has to be beaten into submission or put down entirely."

James takes another swig from the bottle, seemingly having forgotten the experience a moment ago, and cringes at the taste.

"You don't act like that." James says finally, meeting Tiago's steady gaze. "Like I need to be broken before I'm of any use."

Tiago hums in agreement, because the assessment is not wrong, but James is no longer looking at him, instead staring at the spilled scotch on the floor.

The stay like that for several minutes, James silent and pensive, Tiago silent and calculating.

"Is that why they do it? To break us so someone else can't?" James asks in a voice colored with exhaustion.

Tiago starts at the comment, but James doesn't notice.

The man's already unconscious.

* * *

Tiago stands over Bond for a full minute, trying to decide what to do with the body.

Then he remembers James isn't dead.

He doesn't have a guest room so the solution is achingly simple.

* * *

The next morning James wakes up with a splitting headache in bed beside Agent 009. He moves to get up, but relents and falls back into the sheets, pressing his face into Tiago's chest to block out the early morning light.

Tiago is already awake and trying to run numbers in his mind, but nothing comes. He can only focus on James' hot breath against his skin. He doesn't move, and in all honesty he doesn't really want to.

Crippling weakness must feel a lot like love.

* * *

They play this game whenever they find themselves together. Where James pretends to be comfortable in Tiago's presence and they act affectionate toward one another. It's oddly disarming, so Tiago doesn't put a stop to it.

The sex is more gentle. Insults far less stinging.

Neither verbalizes the word 'relationship', because that isn't what this is. But both still feel like any acknowledgement of what's between them will cause it to up and vanish.

"I think you're the only person that understands," James says in a bathroom in Marrakech, voice muffled by the belt Tiago had shoved between his teeth a moment earlier. "Because everyone else is dead."

Tiago doesn't dignify that with a response. Instead he says, "Bite down. This is going to hurt."

He spends the next hour digging hollow-point fragments out of James' back. Toward the end they're both seated on grimy tile, James unresponsive and Tiago exhausted. He slaps the junior agent's cheek lightly and relaxes when James' eyes slide open, clearly disoriented, but aware.

He wonders if James is comforted by the knowledge that his lover is the one holding the knife.

"Something to remember me by." He says, dropping the last small, jagged piece of metal into James' lax hand.

"Get up. Don't bleed out."

"Love you, too." James responds.

Tiago doesn't know what to do with that.

* * *

At some point, Tiago calls James '_Corazón'. _

It sticks.

* * *

"Don't." James says softly, face half buried in his pillow, a sleepy hand reaching out across the sheets to a fully dressed Tiago.

"Not all of us can be junior agents, darling," Tiago tosses back, perched on the bed while he laces his boots. "The world waits for no double-O."

James looks thoroughly unimpressed, even half asleep and well-fucked.

"You can feel free to stop rubbing it in anytime now." Comes the dry reply, and James shoves his face full into the cushion with a groan. Tiago trails a hand lightly along James' exposed ribs, muscles beneath jumping at the too-soft touch.

"Your time will come, _Corazón_. With any luck I'll convince M to reassign you; Station H is so much more exotic than dreary old England."

James doesn't dwell on the comment. Instead he grunts a response and rolls over, exposing himself to his not uninterested lover.

"At least a quick romp before you leave."

"Naughty, James. Trying to distract me from Queen and Country." Tiago eyes him thoughtfully, but doesn't move to engage, instead drags his nails harshly across the pale skin, leaving raised red welts behind. James tries to roll away from the sensation but he's run out of bed.

"In the mean time you'll be here, escorting some bloated official to his scheduled prostitute." Tiego sighs mournfully, clicking his tongue as if chastising a child. "Where are your morals, Agent Bond?"

"Fuck off." James snaps finally, and Tiago laughs deeply as he rises from the bed, one hand reaching for his jacket, the other giving a firm swat to James' backside in lieu of a kiss.

"Until we meet again."

While James doesn't respond, Tiago looks to the mirror and can see the smile tugging at Bond's lips as he runs a hand over his backside, lingering where Tiago's hand had been not a moment earlier.

Pain always lingered longer than pleasure. It was their old standby. Bruises. Scratches. A firm hand to the arse. Something concrete when the reality around them shifted as readily as sand.

_"Something to remember me by." _Tiago thinks fondly, looking back at his disgruntled partner.

"Perhaps next time I see you you'll be a double-O, hmm?" Tiago calls playfully from the doorway and James chucks a whiskey tumbler at his head.

* * *

The death knell is Hong Kong. It's just that neither know it yet.


	3. Chapter 3

The Transfer of Sovereignty is coming far too quickly and MI6 needs to stay informed on Chinese activities before their official presence in Hong Kong is dissolved.

This means Tiago will be lucky to see James at all in the next year.

They pull him out of the field and put him behind a computer with vague instructions to "find anything useful". It's a cheeky little line that really means "hack anything with government encoding", but M can't put that on paper so Tiago gets to work 'debugging' Chinese computers.

He adores Hong Kong. He loves the food, the people and the atmosphere that screams indulgence. What he does not like is being shoved into a cramped office like a drone in Q Branch, stuck digging through years of backlogged files and data when he could be doing so much more. He loves the complexity of computers, the brilliance of millions of lines of code creating an interface that can do so much damage in the right hands. _His hands._

That is not what he is doing here.

However, if this is what M truly needs from him, he will complete his given tasks with the grace and aplomb expected of a double-O.

So he plays the good little soldier and he follows up on cold leads in his spare time to combat boredom. He spends months bypassing Chinese security measures, reporting his findings to the Thames office regularly because that is what he's been told (unofficially) to do.

'_For Her Eyes Only_' is skillfully inked across the top of each report in his own hand. It's a small gesture.

Something to remember him by.

* * *

Buried in the poorly encrypted mainframe of an off-grid Guangdong prison, Tiago finds suspiciously incomplete documents regarding six unnamed 'political prisoners'. A little digging finds them to be missing MI6 employees assumed dead weeks ago; drones that dissappeared from Section H under his watch. Not even junior agents, not a single one trained for the field and none of actual use to the Chinese.

They're just collateral. Bargaining chips.

China wouldn't risk upsetting relations now by abusing men and women who, at the end of the day, amounted to little more than civilians. The blowback would be horrendous if MI6 failed to get them out, likewise if the Chinese tried to barter them in a prisoner exchange.

The situation has to be handled delicately. He brings everything to M's attention and she agrees they have to act before the Transfer. Later she gives him a firm smile and approves his request for a week of leave. His reward for a job well done is that he gets to see James.

It seems fitting that after years of fluidity he finally has something to return home to.

* * *

A month later he's on an MI6 charter en route to London-Heathrow with M and a small contingent of agents out of the Thames office.

She's stressed about the Transfer. Tiago can see it in the shadows under her eyes and the exhaustion in her voice. Everyone is strained, but over tea and Chinese airspace she tells him there's something else.

The Chinese have been monitoring Section H. They know about the hacking and they know he was the agent responsible. The Prime Minister is asking questions. Too many questions.

She doesn't elaborate further.

"Well Mum, next time I'll just have to be more careful." He laughs, but M looks forlorn. Tiago can only grin to himself.

So what if another country has his number? He'll add China to the list. Their's would not be the first government to want his head on a spit. Or will it be the last, for that matter.

The moment passes and he recognises the conversation is over. The other agents mull about and Tiago is bored enough to bring out his laptop. He resists the urge to send a quick message to James - there are too many unfriendly faces in the cabin, the last thing Tiago wants is to draw any undue attention to his Corazón.

He's not as big a fan of idle gossip as James might like to think, and MI6 is a veritable hen house for all it is an intelligence agency.

Some time passes and distantly Tiago recognizes the decompression that comes with a swift decrease in altitude. He ignores it. The jet-streams in this part of the world are unique and he never expects a smooth flight anymore. It's only when his teacup rattles, indicating the lowering of landing gear, that he meets M's gaze. She doesn't outwardly appear concerned, but that's why he's here. To take care of her should anything go wrong.

They've been in the air an hour at most, not enough time to be out of Chinese airspace; which means they're being forced down or the pilot has been compromised.

He waits a beat.

The descent is too smooth. The pilot.

He sets his computer aside, unfastens his safety-belt, unholsters his pistol and motions for M and the other agents to remain silent. She looks suddenly pained, but it doesn't register for Tiago why that might be. He makes his way to the cockpit. Peripherally he can see two agents forming up behind him to block M from any direct line of fire.

He clicks off the safety and reaches for the door, prepared for whatever might come at him.

He doesn't expect what comes from behind.

* * *

He wakes up in a windowless room, tied naked to a chair. His wrists and shoulders ache from the handcuffs restraining him. The air is hot and stale. His captors scream questions at him in Mandarin about what he knows, demand that he reveal how he gained access to their files. Their systems. Their facilities.

It's all depressingly standard. The initial beating is unpleasant, to say the least, but his immediate concerns lie elsewhere.

If they have him, odds are high they have M.

He fights tooth and nail against his jailers. Uses everything MI6 has ever taught him to plot his own escape and M's potential rescue. His fearless struggle only earns him bamboo shoots under his nails.

He knows he won't have to wait long for help if he can't do it on his own, and it's becoming increasingly clear that his chances of unaided escape are dwindling. It's no matter. MI6 will send the cavalry if Mummy is involved in any significant capacity.

Until then he just has to endure some slight discomfort.

* * *

Days bleed into weeks. Slowly he realizes that no MI6 means no M.

He's alone here.

* * *

His current jailers grow bored with traditional measures when they realize he isn't going to talk and mess around with electro-shock for a few days.

He must piss off someone important because that same week a round of guards he's never seen before decide to step up to the power-play that is rape. If his Mandarin is to be trusted, and it is, the guards are going to attempt to "choke him with cock until he vomits or suffocates".

The first man that forces Tiago to his knees loses a good two inches.

They stay away from his mouth after that.

It's a small blessing they don't pull his teeth. The false molar might come in handy later if he needs to poison a guard to escape.

* * *

One month becomes two. Then three. He loses count of the days when they stop feeding him.

* * *

Tiago bites his nails down to the quick so they won't rip them out. He knows it won't actually prevent anything from happening to his hands, but it's a small comfort all the same.

If he can cause himself pain, he can remember who he is and what he's doing this all for.

* * *

When they have him contorted into blindingly painful positions, he tries to meditate.

He thinks about the garden he left in Madrid and of fresh air, of his grandmother and his childhood and her beautiful island. As he loses concentration his thoughts turn to MI6, to M, to James.

Mostly he thinks about why no one has come for him yet.

It is roughly about the time he passes out that he entertains the horrific thought that M left him here on purpose.

* * *

After four months he can barely remember his own name. They force him to drink scalding water and he sleeps only after he's blacked out from pain. They starve him for weeks and then laugh when he pounces on the diseased vermin that infest the prison.

They call him "YīngGuó lǎoshǔ". The English Rat.

He can't remember if they're wrong.

* * *

He can't meditate anymore.

The island that was his respite is twisted and dead.

All he can see are the rats.

They eat everything beautiful.

* * *

He misses James. Misses being able to comfort someone without feeling compromised.

He must start talking in his sleep, because the jailers begin taunting him with his _Corazón_'s name while they do unspeakable things to his flesh.

He feels anger for the first time in months.

For some reason it's directed at James.

* * *

A corpse once told him that a double-O's ranking wasn't just determined by ones ability to take a life, but by how many missions on which the agent in question been assumed dead.

He wonders what his rank is now.

* * *

The torture isn't what drives Tiago to suicide. Though, realistically, it should be, given what he's endured the last one hundred and forty-nine days. He only knows this because he overhears the date and does the math in a blissfully lucid moment. Otherwise time has no meaning here.

He's an MI6 double-O, the best of the best. Torture is not something he's unfamiliar with. He's been shot, stabbed and poisoned more times than he can count. He's been trained to deal with "non-consensual sexual contact" and "forcible interrogation techniques".

He can deal with the pain, with the Chinese, and for five months he has done just that. He is _still_ alive.

In the end what gets him is the waiting. Waiting for M to realize her mistake. For MI6 to raid this hell hole and take him home because he's long given up on escape under his own power.

He's kept his mouth shut for months. Just waiting. Until one night his jailers wake him with a shock baton and show him his own obituary, written by dear old Mum herself, recognizing the loss of a great operative and calling him an "example of British fortitude."

It's a testament to how far gone he is when his only criticism of the piece is that he's Spanish.

* * *

He wakes up the next morning eyes bright and mind clear for the first time in a long time, knowing for certain that he's been burned.

The last conversation with M was his notice of severance, how he didn't recognize it before he'll never know, but what's done is done. He feels so free, now that he finally knows what he has to do.

He says his goodbyes.

The Chinese think he's going to turn.

He only opens his mouth to dislodge the false molar.

* * *

He doesn't die.

As he screams through what's left of his macerated jaw, he wonders why that is.


	4. Chapter 4

A double-O is only as good as their cover. A cover is only as good as ones' appearance. Expensive clothes and a brilliant mind can only go so far in a world that values beauty above all else.

The hospital staff treat him like a leper. If not for his appearance, then for the guards posted outside the cramped room.

He thinks of James. His icy blue eyes and dirty blonde hair. 'Classically handsome' he'd heard someone say a lifetime ago. It may have been him, he can't remember now.

James had called him "swarthy" once, in their hovel of a hotel before James was shot. Their last assignment together. Marrakech.

Tiago realizes suddenly that James has likely thought him dead this whole time. His clearance wasn't high enough to know about the Guangdong handover, and no one knew about their _relationship_. He'll find out second hand that a double-O is dead, maybe he already knows.

It's been five months. Everyone knows.

Something snaps.

He pulls at the restraints shackling him to the hospital bed and feels the loose flesh of his cheek shake with the movement.

He'd known distantly that hydrogen-cyanide could burn through flesh. He hadn't known what the compound could do to bone and cartilage.

Classically handsome. _Swarthy_.

MI6 left him to die. Didn't even have the courtesy to equip him with a proper out.

A breeze from the window cools the exposed wetness of his sagging lower eyelid and he snarls as best he can with a stubbed tongue and no muscle control of what remains of the left side of his face.

He stops thinking about James and focuses on M. On the woman that knowingly sent him to his death.

If she did this to him, she'll do it to anyone. None of them are safe.

He tugs at the restraints again. He may have no voice, but he has his mind and his training. For now that's all he needs.

He didn't die. That means someone else has to.

Everything has to be even.

* * *

He's killed people before. _So many people_. But not like this. Not with so much rage and venom that his vision blurs and his bones ache.

The hate is so tangible Tiago can feel it crawling under his skin like a parasite. He can see it in the way his muscles pull taut as he strangles a night guard with his cuffed hands.

When he comes down there's blood on his hands and he's alone in a stolen car wearing someone else's clothes. He's afraid in that moment.

They taught him how to deal with this. How to suppress volatile behavior in stressful situations.

But he can't. He can't do it.

Years of repressed experiences and buried emotions bubble up in his mind.

All the things MI6 made him do, all of the people he killed, the lives he ruined, what was done to him, what he did to James, it all crescendos into -

* * *

Nothing.

* * *

MI6 thinks Tiago Rodriguez is dead and the Chinese will not be correcting that fact any time soon so he decides to take up a new persona.

He choses Raoul Silva for reasons he can't justify to himself, but he likes how it sounds, and he so deperately wants to like something about himself again.

The whole process is laughably easy, even accounting for his considerable experience in the SIS. New documents, passports, petty cash, everything so readily available that perhaps MI6 does deserve to burn, given how horribly they've failed this world.

Even though he may have new papers, he sadly still resembles the title character of a Gaston Leroux novel.

He cannot return home without a face.

* * *

Time slips by quickly after he pieces together a computer with enough processing power to slip behind Barclays' firewalls.

Initially he only takes the funds that had previously been in his personal accounts.

That's how it starts.

The lines begin to blur. What he did for MI6 would never be considered white hat, they burned morals out of you to make room for the killing, but it becomes increasingly entertaining to play around in other people's systems.

He begins to slip, even by his own standards, but Silva recognizes that he doesn't want to correct the behavior. He wants to explore it, refine it.

MI6 tried to burn this out of him and he wants to know why.

* * *

Initially he doesn't plan to make himself a villain. That comes some years later, after he's built a cyber empire out of smoke and mirrors, embracing the underworld that he had once rallied so hard against.

He kills selectively, those first few years, because a small part of him hopes one day for redemption. To be welcomed home with open arms by M and to touch James again, if only for a moment.

His sentimentality is fleeting.

MI6 taught him everything he needed to know about stealth, about manipulation and exploitation; he puts his training to good use.

He spends hundreds of thousands of Euros on extensive reconstructive surgery and a prosthesis that will give him back his voice. He creates the world's most dangerous weapons by stringing together simple lines of code. If he wants something, he takes it. He plans, and he waits.

Even though he desperately hopes M will still want him when he eventually finds the courage to come home, she still needs to be punished for what she did to him. For what she did to them all - the countless agents that must have come before him.

Revenge is a long time coming.

* * *

He's not celibate, those years after Guangdong.

He finds numerous partners, male and female, to satisfy his needs; but they all pale in comparison to Silva's untouchable memories of James.

With that said, Sévérine comes close.

They meet in an ally off a Macau flea market. She's being chased by god knows who and Silva's training kicks in hard. He knocks two of the men unconscious, the third he outright kills after the man rips away the scarf he has taken to wearing to cover his face. She doesn't thank him, and though she stares openly at his scars she doesn't shy away like the others.

Her name is Sévérine and a local brothel has 'employed' her since she was no more than a child. At twenty-two her beauty hides her rage at the authorities that should have protected her, but she is too soft. Years of conditioning have made her afraid of the very freedom she so desires. In a moment of weakness he offers to train her in the methods that would allow her to seek the revenge she craves, but she doesn't want it. She wants to be taken care of and is too ready to let him take charge and control her every move.

Sévérine does not love him. She makes that clear from the beginning.

In all honesty, he doesn't think she's capable of the emotion, such is her state of mind. Nonetheless, he has no difficulty accepting her declaration and in return he makes a proposal. He will protect her, employ her in a non-sexual capacity and pamper her for as long as she should wish, but she will do as he asks without question or he will kill her outright.

She agrees on the condition he kills her former handlers.

He does this gladly and he lets her watch.

She can never be the companion he wants, but he can be the protection she needs. For now it is enough. It has to be.

He gives her everything and she spends money like it's going out of style. She's vicious and cunning and she points his hired guns at anyone that eyes her crossly. She acts as his public face, and he uses her beauty to draw targets in like he used to be able to do himself.

Their arrangement works for a long time. Longer than it rightly should.

After he obtains a properly fit prothesis their partnership turns sexual; but the act is a hollow comfort and he grows tired of her games. She's grown too ambitious and he needs to take care of her or put her down. He is not like Mother, however, and he will not cast her aside because she no longer serves an immediate purpose.

So he reigns her in. Gives her bodyguards that now answer only to him and sets her loose in a world that he has created.

She grows to resent him as her leash becomes shorter and shorter, but she does this to herself. Sévérine shackled herself to him all those years ago and tossed away the key.

She will not be the death of him.

* * *

A hired gun informs him of "a newly minted double-O" mucking about in Montenegro. An informant in Q branch tells him it's James.

If he anonymously sends his beloved a congratulatory bottle of scotch, no one is the wiser.

* * *

Quantum is a quaint little terror syndicate that Silva never seriously considers joining; the idea of being beholden to any kind of authority, even a criminal one, sickens him to his core.

He's even less endeared after he discovers what they do to James through Vesper Lynd.

In retaliation he drains Quantum's Swiss and South African holdings to throw a wrench in their Bolivia spearhead. The act is part business and part pleasure, because though they've never actually met in person, Dominic Greene has been a thorn in his side since Greene Planet undersold one of Silva's holding companies in Buenos Aires.

The pipeline plan goes up in smoke anyway when MI6 gets involved, and perhaps it's fate that James ends up taking care of Greene for him.

It is just another sign that he and his Corazón were truly destined for one another.

* * *

Istanbul.

He's finally tracked down a complete hard drive of embedded MI6 operatives, and he's a heartbeat away from the retribution he's craved for so very long.

He taps into M's private line, because he wants to hear her lose everything when Patrice walks away with her security blanket. He wants witness the beginning of the end.

Instead he listens as M demands that a junior agent - Moneypenny, Evelyn, an SIS personnel record supplies - take an unclear shot at a double-O. He knows before Moneypenny fires that she'll miss her target.

He can hear it in her voice. A hint of fear that preludes hand tremors and missed opportunities.

He knows that M hears it too.

She's compromised, but Mummy doesn't rescind the order and demands the agent proceed.

* * *

James dies much more quickly than Tiago did.

Small mercies, he supposes.

* * *

He taps into MI6 to witness M fall apart.

In a way, he gets what he wants.

He orders Patrice to go back and search for a body. Sends a small contingent of his personal guard to assist.

In an instant James becomes Bond again.

A part of him had never truly intended to expunge the operatives. A part of him also intended to have a apple blintz for breakfast.

Plans change.

People change.

People die.

* * *

Silva is oddly calm in the days after Bond's death.

He'd truly lost James years ago, and whatever god still believed in Raoul Silva knew how deeply the man had mourned that loss. Perhaps everything had simply come full circle.

"C'est la vie." He says to affably to Sévérine, who watches him with fierce eyes from where she's handcuffed to the headboard.

"Lost your little pet, did you?" She taunts.

He gags her that night.

* * *

Reality catches up to him far too quickly when Patrice hands off the drive, conspicuously alone. Dried blood has stained the edges of the plastic case and Silva is instantly ill. He draws a steady hand over the container.

What's left of James Bond flakes onto the concrete.

Something tightens in his gut and he knows this feeling - hates it to his very core.

"Did you find the body?" He asks Patrice carefully. The man does not confirm, only takes his payment from Sévérine and leaves.

He has the drive. The mission was successful.

"_Did you find the body?" _He demands of the quiet room. No one moves. No one answers.

He is struck by a vision of rats devouring James' waterlogged corpse.

He resists the urge to retch, largely because he can't tell if the impulse is coming from a place of grief or rage.

He chooses rage and puts a bullet between the eyes of the man closest to him. A new hire. Easily replaced, but it doesn't help.

He chokes on his own breath and screams at the floor until wetness gathers at the corner of his good eye and the voice modulator in his prothesis shorts out.

Everything is different now. The precise planning, tireless work, years of delicate coding and manipulation suddenly meaningless in the face of an all encompassing desire to kill. To burn everything and butcher everyone. A hundred thousand contingencies and this was never one of them.

Years of deifying James made Silva blind to the man's mortality. His hands shake imperceptibly. He feels doubt for the first time in years.

James is his. James _was_ his.

Bond wasn't hers to lose.

* * *

He's tired. So very tired.

* * *

Sévérine must hustle Patrice along, because the assassin is nowhere to be found after Silva manages to compartmentalize his loss and compose himself.

He finds her, cigarette in hand, nursing her bruises from the night before. She hides her emotion well enough, but he can see the sly indulgence coiling beneath her passive exterior.

"You are so proud, " He drawls, stalking toward her. "That you lived to see me hurt this way, hmm?"

"I didn't think it was possible." She tosses back witheringly from her seat at the bar. "He meant too much to you. Your whole world revolved around an obsession with a man who did not even know your name. Now you have time to focus on what is truly important."

Silva's hands clench into fists.

She has no idea of the hundreds of plots and potential missions that dried up in his mind the second Patrice returned unaccompanied. He didn't truly need her if James was ever to come back into the fold, that was what he had always told himself.

"Enjoy your moment of triumph." He barks, turning his bloodshot gaze on Sévérine only to have the woman assess him in return. She smiles viciously, a small quirk of her lips that speaks volumes.

In a heartbeat he's crossed the room, his hand around her throat, gripping tightly.

"You are going to be with me for a very long time, my darling," He says hotly as she gasps. "And I will keep you safe, if nothing else."

He releases her and she coughs pointedly, but her eyes are still gleaming as she grabs her wine glass to toast him, victorious.

She's all he has left and she knows it. A woman who no more cares for him than M did.

* * *

That night he dreams of M for the first time in a long time.

She's playing with dolls. Hundreds of them. Delicate little things made of porcelain, each one a unblemished mirror image of her precious agents.

She hand paints the faces on each one with such love. She dresses them in the finest little clothes and they drink the most exotic tea that's never existed.

And she grows bored with them one by one. Tossing the old aside to fashion the new.

Tiago's doll isn't like the others, though, he's perfect, untainted and cherished like nothing else.

Until she spills a bit of tea on his little velvet jacket.

Silva wants to yell at M, tell her he isn't ruined, that he's still good inside, but she tosses the little Spanish doll aside, where it's warm porcelain face cracks on the cold marble floor and rests among the splinters of countless others, largely intact but irreparably damaged.

As is, he can only watch as she discards figure after figure with only one of his beautiful brown glass eyes still able to see.

She comes to her last doll, a once beautiful James Bond, and pauses, inspecting the cracks and chips in his patina, the dirt and age that have darkened his once bright golden hair to a dull brown.

She holds the figure with such care, like she used to hold Tiago, and then lets go.

James shatters on the marble. Little broken bits mixing in with what is left of Tiago's ruined body.

M sweeps them both into the dustbin.

* * *

Silva wakes up with blood in his mouth.

He's bitten through his tongue.


	5. Chapter 5

He doesn't throw away the broken hard drive case.

It rests innocuously beside one of his favorite jerry-rigged mainframes, the rusty brown discoloration of the plastic a silent shrine to James' passing. It has no meaning, Silva tells himself. He just can't find the time to dispose of the damn thing.

It's a week before Sévérine finds the cracked pieces of plastic. She gives him a simpering look and chucks it into the bin with a sneer.

"Out with the old," She says, like the phrase should set right so many broken promises, and settles onto his lap, legs spread wide.

"It is only you and me now."

He doesn't correct her.

* * *

He sequesters himself and spends weeks fine-tuning his plans for London. To test his system he destabilizes the security protocols regulating leak containment at a chemical plant off the Chinese coast. The facility is state-run and isolated on a hideously urbanized slip of island; it's ugly, overpopulated and reeks of desperation. Nothing like his grandmother's small paradise and Silva suddenly wants something ugly to call his own, seeing as he can't have beautiful things anymore.

Sévérine is horrified when he announces him plans to relocate for the foreseeable future; she even has her men set charges all across the island, blowing holes in every standing structure. The place is a wasteland when she's done and the act does nothing but annoy him. He has her personal guard _reassigned _and gives her a new staff, this one unquestioningly loyal to Silva. This doesn't stop Sévérine from being a right terror; ordering up executions like the Red Queen and Silva does nothing to stop her.

Truthfully he doesn't care. She can do as she wishes as long as she's his at the end of the day.

A part of him recognizes, however, that the status quo will soon change. It has to. She has too much power and he's too apathetic to deal with it.

She'll end up killing him at some point. It's almost inevitable. He just hopes he is able to exact his revenge on M first.

So for the moment her punishment is lacking, but he has the bigger picture to worry about. When the dust has settled - literally and figuratively - he breaks into MI6's security mainframe and blows M's office into the Thames.

The act isn't as satisfying as he hoped it would be.

* * *

His little game flushes more than just M out of the grass.

Bond is alive.

Silva's mole in Q branch confirms the report, even sends a grainy surveillance video of a decidedly worse-for-wear 007 in the shooting range.

The man looks so old. So tired. Nothing like the James he once knew, instead like death warmed over.

He laughs until he can no longer breathe, vision blurred from tears.

He wonders why he finds that thought so funny.

* * *

His mind recalibrates in minutes. Acceptance replaces disbelief and _Agent 007 _takes his place on the playing field.

Silva bursts through firewalls, decrypts state communications and piggybacks every transmittable frequency in MI6's emergency facility.

What he finds does not surprise him.

Bond woefully underperforms on all of his tests. His psychological evaluation is terrible, his stamina nonexistent and his aim shit. He can barely pass for a decent drone, let alone a highly trained double-O.

Silva is certain that M won't allow her precious Bond back into the field just yet, not to face an unknown enemy and certainly not after Bolivia.

* * *

Without fail, Mummy surprises him with her cruelty.

It makes him cringe. She killed Bond once and she's prepared to do it again.

* * *

He is fully aware that MI6 has no idea of his true identity, or even an inkling of his current one, and yet they send Bond scurrying after an invisible man.

It's deplorable.

That said, he doesn't expect Bond to find Patrice in Shanghai, and he certainly doesn't foresee Bond killing the man while the assassin is still on Silva's payroll.

None of his men recognize Bond, this includes his darling Sévérine. However, being the cautious genius he is, Silva immediately starts planning for every possible contingency.

The most likely of which being that Sévérine will intercept the man she knows only as an MI6 agent and try to hand over Silva. He gets his just desserts and she gets an empire; it's the kind of poetic justice that she so adores.

While everything is simply speculation on his part, her future insubordination can not be tolerated. So he sends Sévérine to Macau to intercept Bond. He places her in the casino, knowing her doe-eyed pleas for freedom will draw James like a moth to a flame. James will try to help free her, because somewhere down deep the man still thinks he's a white knight. For Sévérine he'll be equal parts savior and saboteur; only Bond's actions will decide her fate.

How he wishes he could be there, to see the dawning realization on her face.

She's a smart girl, but he's the one that trained her. This will be the last time she plays him for a fool.

* * *

He taps into the closed-circuit surveillance system of the Golden Dragon and just watches. He can't hear what Sévérine and Bond discuss, but he doesn't need to. She's trying to save herself at his expense.

He sees her tell, plain as day through the monitor.

She's afraid.

He's mildly surprised to see his men attempt to kill the agent, but he can't feign ignorance. He's been indisposed for too long and Sévérine is too attractive. It's a problem that will soon be rectified.

Bond escapes the Komodo pit and disappears.

Silva is far from worried.

* * *

He cannot sleep.

He concocts scenario after scenario in his mind of how the next day should go.

How should they meet? What should he say? Should he restrain Bond and play the quintessential villain? Should he drug the agent only to have him wake vulnerable in Silva's bed?

So many options that fly out the window when he receives notice The Chimera has docked.

He'll go with the chair. A classic standby and one James will appreciate.

* * *

Bond does not recognize him.

Silva realized years ago that his appearance would never be what it once was. The stresses he'd endured had turned his hair a patchy white that necessitated regular bleaching because the uneven tone bled through every colored dye he tried. Hydrogen cyanide had eaten away at his admirable bone structure and years of surgery had followed to restore any hint of his former visage. His vocal cords were so damaged his voice is now largely synthesized.

He can barely tell he's a Spaniard himself, anymore, but he must look a mess if James can not see even a shadow of his former lover in Silva's face.

The disappointment compounds because he does not expect James to have forgotten him entirely. Even after the story of the island. Even after the gentle caressing and playful chiding.

What had M put him through to make him forget Tiago Rodriguez so thoroughly?

"See what she's done to you." He bemoans, and Bond assumes he's talking about the scars.

He keeps pushing, hinting at their shared past when he realizes what 007 must think this exchange really is. A power play to turn him, to lose faith in MI6 and his beloved M; which, honestly, is true. Silva _does_ want Bond to turn rogue, to have the agent defect right back into his bed.

"_It is about you."_ A small part of him wants to say. _"It was always about you."_

But there is no joyous reunion this day, no passionate embrace, and Silva takes out his anger on his dear Sévérine, as promised.

He leads Bond into the courtyard, the intercom plays their song. Well, in all fairness, it's _a_ song. Silva can't remember details so well anymore, and it has been a very long time for both of them.

* * *

"Darling, your lovers are here."

Sévérine stares at him with outright hate as he approaches with the shot glass, recoiling in revulsion when he tries to give her one last kiss, but he can only smile. Silva leans in close, glass delicately pinched between his fingers.

"When anything is redundant, it is eliminated. You have become redundant, love."

"You'll burn for this," she hisses at him through bloody lips as he turns away. "Your precious little _Corazón _is going to see right through you and he's going to know there is nothing left inside but the putrified rot you call a soul. _He will never love you._"

He places the shot glass squarely on her head as a response.

She knew the stakes long before James was even a player in this game. He gave her fair warning, and she ignored him; used him like so many others had used him.

He forces Bond to take the shot when he can barely steady the pistol. Taunts him. Questions if he's still an agent, still the man he once was.

Understandably, Bond misses.

Silva is not surprised. Bond carries himself like a newborn faun on unsteady legs, forcibly brought into a world he does not yet understand.

Sévérine stares at him, unblinking. Silva does not miss his shot.

She drops and he has flashes of M and her wretched dolls.

It's cruel. It's disturbed. It is also, indeed, a waste of good scotch. In the moment he can't bring himself to care.

He recognizes that this will only hurt James' perception of him when he finally realizes that Raoul Silva is Tiago Rodriguez, but it's a bit late for subtlety. Fifteen years have passed since M left him to die. Time enough for James Bond to forget Agent 009.

He's played his hand and lost.

So he lets Bond have his little radio. Lets him believe he's captured the head of a deadly terrorist organization. MI6 will cart him back to England, and all he has to do now is wait for the pieces to come together. He always has a Plan B, and he may not have James, but M is close second.

He'll take what he can get.

* * *

He's restrained on the flight back to England. Bond just watches him from across the cabin. The man looks focused, but Silva can see the exhaustion creeping in.

He wonders if death broke James the way it broke him.

* * *

Mummy won't say his name, and perhaps she knew about his and James' little affair from the beginning. Likely used it to mold Bond into the agent he is today. He wouldn't put it past her. Not now. Not after everything she's done.

Still, she tries so hard to dismiss him as a psychopath, to color her sins as his own, and James stands there all the while, dutifully listening to every word spoken.

He's suddenly furious. She'll be dead soon enough, but to stand here and explain himself is beyond degrading. All he wants is for M to admit fault, any fault, enough to spark the growing doubt in Bond's mind.

He removes his prosthesis, not so much for her witness as for Bond. When the double-O cringes slightly, something akin to hope bubbles in Silva's chest.

Sympathy can be manipulated.

It's a start.

* * *

A short time after M's attempt at grandstanding she must have informed Bond about Silva's true identity, because not ten minutes later 007 is there, waving off the junior agents with false nonchalance.

The doors lock and the glass goes opaque and they are alone for the first time in over a decade.

Bond just stares at him. Eyes scanning Silva's body, lingering a beat too long on the left side of his face. Surveillance must still be in place for the agent to be acting this cautious, so Silva elects to make the first move.

"I was hurt you didn't recognize me."

"So you killed Sévérine." It isn't a question.

"I was upset, you understand."

"You died."

"So did you. What was it you said your hobby was? Resurrection?"

James remains unmoved, but his eyes are shining in the dim light.

"We always did share similar interest, James."

"I-" Bond starts, but stops abruptly, refusing to continue. Silva watches as his counterpart turns on a heel and swiftly from the holding cell.

"_Corazón_." He says softly to James' retreating back.

If Bond's step falters, Silva doesn't catch it.

* * *

His precious Quartermaster trips the failsafe.

The doors slide open so swiftly and he's free.

* * *

007 chases him through the underground and Silva hasn't been this happy in _years_. When Bond finally 'corners' him, gun steady, Silva slides down the iron ladder and lands with a splash into stagnant water.

"I won't miss next time, Mr. Silva." Bond calls, his voice echoing in the cavernous space. "You had a good run."

Silva clucks sadly and pulls off his cap, running a hand through his hair, feigning defeat.

"I did didn't I?" He says mournfully. "But you did too."

He starts walking toward Bond and the agent falters.

"Say my name. I have waited so long for this moment, and now you've finally caught me. Do what she could not and say it."

Bond's face is a mess of conflicted emotions, but he lowers his gun and doesn't pull away when Silva presses flush against his rigid body.

"Tiago," Bond says, disbelieving.

"I missed you." Silva replies, bringing a hand up to stroke the other man's cheek. "I am so very glad she couldn't kill you."

James looks stricken as he presses a hand to Silva's chest, feeling warmth and the dull thud of a heartbeat beneath his bulletproof vest and horribly out of place police uniform.

"There is my James," Silva grins, bringing his hand up to trail his fingers through the other's short hair. "Hiding under all that double-O mess. I thought I'd lost you for good."

"How did you survive?" Bond asks, eyes sharp with the barest hint of desperation in his voice. The first crack in the agent's facade that Silva has personally witnessed, and he wants to be gentle, _so gentle_, with his James in that moment.

"I could ask the same, but that is a story for another time, _Corazón_."

Bond is so different, physically and mentally, but all Silva can see is the man he left in his bed so long ago.

A small part of him is screaming that _this is it_, this is what he wanted and it is time to stop, but Silva does as he has always done since Guangdong: he ignores whatever fragment of his conscience survived his own death.

James takes a step back and clears his throat.

"Macau, the island, those were _your_ men trying to kill me."

Silva huffs a breath, shaking his head and contemplating Sévérine. He can't explain now, not when the wounds are so fresh.

"I would never do anything to you that I am not certain you will survive. Call it a personal exercise in futility."

James looks doubtful, but Silva has run out of time.

He has a plan, he has a mission that has taken so much of him. A month ago James was dead. The man is an outlier; a contingency Silva planned for but never expected to encounter. James is not his target, as much as Silva might want him to be. He almost feels remorseful when he sees the hope in James' eyes fade. The calculating flinty gaze of a double-O slipping in to replace it.

"Regretfully, I have rather serious business to attend to, so this conversation will have to wait."

He swipes Bond's feet out from beneath him and shimmies back up the ladder while James scrambles for his gun.

"A parting gift, my love," Silva smiles cheekily, staring down at Bond. "The latest thing from my local toy store. It's called radio."

He blows a hole in the celling and 007 looks decidedly unimpressed. The moment is gone and Silva mourns it briefly.

"I do hope that wasn't for me."

"No," he laughs, breathless, knowing exactly what is to come. "But that is."

Silva hopes that Bond recognizes how loved he is, for Silva to throw a tube train at him.

* * *

After MI6, and more accurately Agent 007, foils his plan to murder M before god and country, Silva goes into Scotland guns blazing. The cyber trail Q branch had cooked up was adorable, so quaint in design and function, but Silva knew where Bond would take Mum from the start.

He'd lead her right to where it all began. Skyfall. The ancestral Bond estate.

One of Silva's shelf companies purchased the property after James' apparent death months ago and he really doesn't want to see his drones destroy something that may even distantly have meant anything to his tortured James.

This does not mean, however, that Bond does not need to be taught a very painful lesson.

M still needs to die.

It's so fitting he could weep.


	6. Chapter 6

The flight from Biggin Hill to Skyfall Lodge is shorter than he imagined it would be, the AgustaWestland performing admirably in Scotland's less-than-ideal weather conditions. Nonetheless, the trip provides ample time for reflection after Silva syncs the appropriate playlist into the speaker system.

After everything, his capture, escaping from MI6's through the catacombs of the London underground, after the _damn train_, he'd hesitated in the hearing room.

Of course in the moment he'd felt he was savoring his victory over M, but nonetheless it was hesitation. An unacceptable reluctance to _pull the damn trigger._ If he'd had his wits about him, he'd have killed her outright. Where was his training? Years of

He wants her dead. That is what he's told himself from the beginning. She's the endgame. She's the final crucible. She's all he has left to fight.

To fight for.

Except there's James.

No. That isn't right. There's Bond. Agent 007. The shell of his former lover and last man standing between him and his revenge.

He doesn't want to kill James. He really doesn't. But if _007 _gets in his way again he might just have to.

He won't hesitate this time.

That's what he tells himself.

This game of cat and mouse has worn thin, and Silva wants to taste blood.

* * *

Skyfall is a travesty.

He doesn't want any of his men to harm M, and expresses such over the roar of the AW101's rotor blades. He leaves James out of the statement because he is deeply conflicted over the proper course of action he should take regarding their relationship.

Bond has better training than most of the men in Silva's employ. He'll survive the assault, if nothing else.

Then he sees it.

The Aston.

MI6's stunning throwback to the golden era of secret intelligence and James' all-time favorite car.

He knows exactly how to punish his _Corazón._

The Aston goes up in flames after Silva turns the AW101's .50 caliber guns on the already bullet-riddled vehicle. A small part of him cringes at the thought of destroying a classic, but he thinks he's proven his point.

* * *

Something inside the house explodes, rocketing debris into the sky and knocking him back a few steps. Silva hears a mechanical whine and looks up to see his helicopter careen forward and ram into the manor house. Everything goes up in flames and he's thrown onto his back by the ensuing explosion.

It takes a moment for him to find his bearings. Physically and mentally.

M was in the house.

James.

One of his guards stumbles past, Michele, and he spins away from the inferno to gather his thoughts.

His eyes catch on something out in the moors. A light. His mind reels, trying to establish if the scene is real or imagined, and it hits him.

The priest hole. How had he forgotten about priest hole? Damn thing had been a 'selling point'.

She might be out there, clever bitch, but James was in the house until the last.

The things he's going to do to her if James didn't make it out.

He sends his remaining men around the perimeter to find Bond and starts toward the light.

She won't escape him this time.

* * *

The light from the blazing lodge is intense and bathes the entire valley with a golden-red glow.

Under other circumstances, Silva would find the sight beautiful.

He makes it around the frozen lake and ignores the bone-numbing cold. His boys didn't find James - he didn't really expect them to - and he orders them to form up on him.

He doesn't want to leave anything else to chance.

When he stops to look back at the lodge, he can only see the property value plummeting. The old house had been beautiful, full of old world charm and memory.

This is a lie. Truthfully, he can only assume. He'd never actually set foot in the place, but he'll rebuild something better.

A testament to James Bond and the family that once loved him.

He's shaken from his reverie by a a figure sprinting through the dark. He knows that run. That controlled little sprint and leg lift and, no.

He laughs to himself and unholsters his gun, firing at the ice James is running so fiercely across. The agent skids to a stop and meets Silva's gaze, expression challenging.

"Do you see what comes of all this running around, Mr. Bond? All this jumping and fighting, it's exhausting."

They both know what this is. He's giving James the opportunity to back away, to let him finish his work in peace.

"Relax. You need to relax."

Michele emerges from the dark behind Bond and Silva can't help but smile. He looks back to the chapel and sees a telltale light.

"Ah well, mother's calling. I will give her a good-bye kiss for you."

He thinks that will be the end of it, but James, no, this one is _Bond, _grabs Michele's gun and fires into the ice, which shatters beneath their feet and both men disappear into the icy black water.

"_Ohmygod_," he mutters tiredly, and laughs humorlessly.

"You did this to yourself, James!" He yells out over the ice. "Let me know if you survive so we can speak to your deep-seated martyr complex, hmm?"

With that he walks away.

James will likely die from this, and Silva will not be going in after the man. He'll deal with M, then he will deal with James.

He stalks his way to the chapel, past a decrepit little graveyard and stops at the name _Bond. _Andrew and Monique Delacroix. James spoke of them once. A lifetime ago. Silva glances back to the lake, icy surface practically glowing in the firelight.

He smiles at the headstone.

"Thank you for giving me your son." He says gently, sinking to one knee to grasp a small handful of frozen soil.

"I do wish things could have gone differently. For all of us."

He rises to his feet and shakes the dirt out over the grave.

It would be impolite not to pay his respects, no matter the circumstances.

Even if he has his own mother to kill.

* * *

M is in his arms, a gun pressed to her head, _his head, _and he waits for her to pull the trigger. To end them both. He can finally be free from this hate, and in death he may even see James.

The shot doesn't come, but blinding agony comes from behind. He turns slowly and sees Bond, of all people. Dripping and so very much alive.

The double-O stabbed him. Knifed him in the back and he's suddenly furious.

It hurts, yes, like nothing in a long time, but the symbology is so poignant he can only snarl at 007 as his knees give out beneath him.

He can not die like this. He will not die like this. Not with M on her last leg. Not with his James _right there_, hiding beneath Bond's skin like a scared child.

"Last rat standing." Bond says, eyes piercing and voice emotionless, and Silva can't verbalize a response. Red is creeping into his vision and before he falls unconscious he sees a flicker of _something _behind the agent's eyes.

It's his beloved James. Everything suddenly clicks into place. It has to be this way, for both of them. It's fate that he should die like this, by his_Corazón's_ hand and no other.

How had he never realized?

It was never about M.

He slumps to the cold stone floor and listens to James Bond weep over a body that isn't his.

* * *

He wakes up and upon realizing he's not actually dead spits curses at whatever deity might still be listening.

One of his men must have survived the offensive and dressed Silva's wounds after calling for backup. Bond, M and the Kincaid man are nowhere to be seen in the dim morning haze. Silva is somewhat relieved to not have to face his sins in the cold light of day.

Skyfall Lodge is still burning halfheartedly as he's loaded into the secondary helicopter.

They tell him to lie stationary but he turns his head to watch the dying flames as they fly overhead and wonders if this was cleansing for Bond. To so thoroughly destroy his past, to purge any remnant of the pain and loss associated with Skyfall.

He hopes, distantly, that James regards him now as he does Vesper. As a love lost to betrayal and circumstance.

It is too much to wish for now. James has seen him for what he truly is. He should have died. He wanted to die. _James wanted him to die._

It's over now.

He didn't think there was anything of his old self left; He realizes, as they fly over the Scottish moors, James didn't kill Tiago, James killed Silva.

_"_He killed Silva."He says aloud, his throat so dry his voice is nonexistent, and he laughs. He can't stop the tears that follow soon after, from overwhelming emotion and the agony of a collapsed lung, but he laughs through them.

Through the pain, through the memories, through the years of bloodshed and regret.

He's not angry anymore.

At anything or anyone.

He's free.

* * *

He tries to order the heli down.

The pilots ignore him. No one in the compartment seems to acknowledge he's even spoken.

Through a sedated haze he realizes he's restrained.


	7. Chapter 7

Three weeks he's in a secure recovery ward after a surgeon stitches up the tear in his lung.

Allegedly he's a 'flight risk'.

It doesn't help that he accidentally strangles a nurse while in the throws of a particularly vivid hallucination when they try first tried to restrain him. After that he's heavily sedated so the passage of time is a non-issue.

When the doctors finally clear him he's processed by MI6, and the agents are significantly less accommodating this time around.

He's strip searched, hosed down and thrown unceremoniously into an improvised holding cell. All brick and mortar with heavy locks and even heavier implications.

There's nothing modern about this place.

It reminds him of Guangdong. No windows. No air. No hope.

They tell him M is dead. He asks about James.

They take his implant.

He folds himself into the lotus position and waits for MI6 to put a bullet in his brain.

* * *

That night he dreams.

He can see his grandmother's island, lush and beautiful once more. Untouched by ungrateful hands or diseased vermin.

His mother is there, her dark hair fanning around her shoulders like a halo and she's more beautiful than anything he can remember. She speaks softly in his native tongue and strokes his damaged cheek like nothing in the world has ever hurt him.

She calls him Raoul. She calls him Silva.

He tries to ask her why she won't call him by his name, his real name.

She is confused and asks him what he means.

He tries to call himself Tiago, but the name won't come; the word dying on his lips like a last breath.

Mother shushes him and smiles knowingly, her dark eyes glowing red in the evening sun. She tells him she understands.

She tells him he's home, and home is no place for rats.

* * *

There's a commotion outside the cell. He stretches his arms above his head and savors the sensation of his joints loosening.

This must be it.

He welcomes whatever destiny the fates have chosen for him.

The locks slide open, the harsh sound reverberating through the small room and suddenly there is light, blinding and deistic.

When his eyes adjust, he sees James.

He tries to smile but his face will not cooperate.

He must be dead already.

* * *

Bond hauls him bodily off the cot and uses a zip tie to restrain his arms behind his back. The plastic cuts into his wrists, but he doesn't struggle, even if the double-0 acts like he's resisting.

James leads him quickly out of the cell, in the process stepping over two unconscious guards.

"You will do exactly as I say, understood?" Bond says, not making eye contact and leading him through corridor after winding corridor. "You will answer my questions or I will hand you over to Mallory and he won't hesitate to kill you."

The statement implies that James does _not_ intend to kill him. It's something he didn't know he needed to hear.

Bond bundles him into a town car with blacked out windows and they're flying through the London underground, past armed guards and MI6 checkpoints, onto busy London streets. They're both silent and instinctively Silva maps their progress in his head, even though he can see exactly where they are.

Four minutes southwest, right turn, twenty-six seconds, left turn, bridge - he closes his eyes and rests his head against the window.

He doesn't know where they're going, but the uncertainty doesn't concern him; he trusts his driver.

At a traffic light James leans over and cuts the tie.

His hands burn as blood flow is restored.

They drive in silence for what feels like an eternity before James pulls into a private car-park off a residential building. Silva wants to snark at the man, say something witty like, _"You didn't even offer to buy me dinner first", _but the words won't come.

It's for the best.

* * *

"Sit."

He does as instructed and Bond pulls a small metal case out of nowhere and places it squarely in Silva's hands. It's the implant. Silva doesn't hesitate to put it back in, relishing the feel of his face reforming around the antiseptic tasting plastic.

Bond watches in silence.

"James-" He starts, not entirely certain of what he intends to say, when 007 cuts him off abruptly.

"Shut it."

He falls silent again and time passes slowly. One beat. Then two.

"You're blonde."

"And you've aged terribly. We all have our crosses to bear."

"You're psychotic."

"Perhaps."

"It's a minute detail, but I want to understand. Help me understand what happened to you." Bond relents, eyes dark.

He hums softly.

"It was the only feasible option."

In two steps, James is beside him, using a firm hand to turn Silva's head to examine behind his ear.

"Skin grafts." Bond replies as he traces a finger along the nearly imperceptible scars Silva has hidden for so long under his hairline.

"Surely you don't think a compound that can burn through bone would leave flesh unharmed? I was not a pretty sight, my love."

He reaches up to lightly clasp James' hand, and guides the man's fingers from the left side of his face down the column of his throat to feel the ropey scar tissue beneath unnatural skin.

"Torture does leave it's mark."

"One sympathizes." James says and pulls his hand away, falling into the seat opposite Silva.

"So I've heard. Montenegro?"

"How did you -?"

"A debriefing report said Le Chiffre interrogated you. I do not want to dwell on the number of poor souls who can no longer reproduce thanks to his quaint little obsession with male genitalia. For a money man he was very, shall we say, _hands on._"

"How do you know that?"

"The criminal underworld leaks like a sieve if you know where to look. Warlords and dictators are always gossiping - in this economy you have to know what you're getting when it comes to hired help."

"And MI6?"

"Clearly does not know where to look."

007 takes a breath and exhales slowly, assessing Silva's calm state.

"You're nothing like I remember."

Silva laughs and tosses his head in dismissal. He wants to stop this discussion. He doesn't want to rehash the past.

"Obviously." He says smoothly, with an edge of finality to signal this particular line of questioning is over.

Something flashes in Bond's eyes, and the man is immediately on his feet, stalking toward Silva. The reaction is not anticipated by either of them.

This James does not handle teasing like he used to. Perhaps that was to be expected.

"I don't '_remember_' you at all." Bond says, face unreadable and voice raw. "Because there was nothing left to remember you by. No photos. No notes. No tokens of affection. We were so thorough that there was nothing left of _us _when _you_ died. And you did die, _Tiago_," He puts a hard emphasis on the name, almost spitting.

"Because I mourned you. MI6 burned everything until you were nothing but a name on a wall that thousands of people passed, uncaring, every damn day. So yes, I forgot what you looked like, but I forgot _everything_. What your voice sounded like, how you smelled, how you tasted - I had nothing left but a name that no one would speak aloud and _I. Mourned. You_." James' voice becomes progressively tight as he speaks, words choked with emotion Silva can't quite identify.

"So yes, you are not the man I remember, _but I can't remember anything_. For all your genius you forgot the one thing you have no control over," James leans in and presses his lips to Silva's ear roughly, hissing sharply, "You forgot about _time_."

The agent pulls away, breathing heavily and Silva can barely hold eye contact.

"James,"

"Don't. Do not placate me. Do not coddle me, and do not bloody well play me. Just tell me what I want to know."

He eyes Bond warily and slumps his shoulders in mock defeat before steel creeps into his voice.

"Fine."

If James wants a reason, wants to understand, he'll tell him everything; but this will be done on his terms.

"I don't know what world you live in, Mr. Bond, but I assure you it is not the same one I inhabit. If you think that after everything I endured, after my country _abandoned_ me, that I should be the same man I was all those years ago, you are beyond the pale."

"You broke, Tiago. I didn't. Neither of us are the same men we were a decade ago."

"Oh, no, no, no, no, James. You are broken, too. You just haven't realized it yet, because you are held together by your misplaced loyalty and 'pathetic love of country'. Not to worry. Soon those little cracks are going to spread, and everything you know will shatter beneath you. There will be nothing left but you and your insanity, because that is what they have bred in us. Double-0s aren't supposed to live this long, James. You know it, Mallory knows it, even the Prime Minister knows it. Because after enough time we evolve into something they can't control, something they fear. You can already feel it, can't you? Bubbling up inside you like a sickness. That is what doubt feels like, _Corazón_, and it will eat you alive."

He stops speaking and looks pointedly at James, lips pursed.

"Are you still attracted to me?"

"No." Bond responds, without a beat of hesitation.

"Then questions about my appearance are not an issue, not now. Did you think you were alone in your grief? To you I simply died, but my _life_ was stolen from me. Everything I had ever done, poof, gone. Wiped away to cover up for her mistakes. She took my face, my home, my _name. _She even took you."

"And now she's dead."

"And now she is dead; but you are not, James, you are here and her presence lingers on because you _still doubt me._"

"You purged our operatives. Bombed MI6."

"I have killed a great number of people, James. A few dead agents are nothing to a man who has lost everything."

"You killed M and blew up my car, my _house_. I don't want to understand you."

"Oh, but you do, because you still love me."

"Tiago-"

"I think it would be best for your sanity if you started calling me by my other name."

"Silva? Did you pick that yourself?"

"Call me sentimental."

"Pardon me if I want to address my partners by their given name and not something they picked out of an erotic novella."

"That would certainly be a first for you, then."

James balks at the comment, but comes back enraged.

"You killed Sévérine, why?"

"Don't get testy, you fucked her once, only _after _she relayed the information she was supposed to. As per my instruction. As to your question: we had an agreement and she failed to uphold her end of the bargain."

"You shot her."

"That was the agreement. Her task was to get you to me, preferably _without _spreading her legs. How naive are you, James? To really think a woman so easily identifiable as a former sex slave would readily jump into bed with a mysterious foreigner willing to whisk her away? Hmm? Nothing about that struck you as odd?"

Bond's gaze is cold in response, and Silva huffs a breath, flippantly waiving away the unwanted look.

"I will let you in on a little secret," He motions for Bond to move closer, but the man doesn't budge. "Sévérine, her little tell?"

He shakes his hand lightly, mimicking the woman's tremors.

"It was not me she was afraid of, _Corazón_. In you, she saw her end."

Bond furrows his brow but does not reply, so Silva continues on; sensing an opportunity.

"You are as I was, James. Little by little a double-0 loses their soul, until all the darkness of humanity can be compartmentalized. And that is where you've locked me away, in a _tiny corner_ of your mind with all the others you've lost. I can see it in your eyes. I'm right there next to Vesper Lynd, the only difference is that I truly loved you. Them? The used you and yet _they _claim your loyalty? It's sick, and quite honestly a disgrace to _my _memory that you give the dead such power over you."

Bond doesn't respond, but his stoic expression is belayed by the manner in which his eyes glisten with unshed tears.

He simply retreats to a room off the main hallway that Silva suspects is an office, and returns with a duffel bag overflowing with clothes. Silva doesn't need to look to know there's a passport and falsified documentation tucked away somewhere inside.

Bond holds the bag out like an offering.

"If you still have any respect for what we had, you'll walk away."

Silva can't process what is happening quickly enough and feels the all too familiar sensation of revulsion curling in his gut.

"I love you, James, I do, but I will rip the skin from your skull if you take this away from me."

James looks more intent, if anything.

"There's nothing left for you here."

"You should have left me to drown in my own blood. Better yet, put a bullet in my brain and be done with me. Would that ease your pain, darling? Make this parting of the ways a bit easier?"

007 doesn't move, he just drops the duffle.

Silva doesn't know what possesses him to take the bag and slip into the night like a common criminal. He thinks later that it might have been love.

Regardless, death would have hurt less than this.

* * *

Six months pass. Raoul Silva rebuilds everything MI6 destroyed. He gains back his funds, his properties, his men, everything.

There is a glaring difference, however, between then and now.

He is without purpose or direction.

He's empty.

* * *

"What the hell is that?"

"I believe it's a sugar skull, Sir."

Mallory eyes the garish bauble resting neatly on his desk. Bond has difficulty placing where he's seen the item before.

"How quaint. Someone get rid of it."

* * *

When Bond returns to his flat that evening he walks right past his dining room table, where a similar confectionary skull sits deftly beside a bottle of Dalmore Trinitas.

When James backpedals, recognizing the out of place items, he finds a short note, written in elegant sprawling script.

_We have grown strong together, Corazón. For that I will never be sorry._

James grabs a glass from the wet bar and falls into a leather armchair, reaching to pry the stopper from the bottle when he freezes. The name clicks and the silver stag's head on the bottle glints dully.

"Fuck you, Tiago."

He doesn't open the bottle, no matter how badly he wants to. He simply _can't._

The lead crystal tumbler ends up in pieces on the floor.

His eyes burn.


	8. Chapter 8

The muffled pop-pop of gunfire shakes him from his concentration and the soldering iron burns right through the connecting wire he was trying so hard to avoid.

"_Gilipollas!" _He spits and rips off his safety glasses.

The gunfire continues, and Silva can hear distant shouting.

"God help you all if we are not under siege." He snaps at the dismantled circuit board and turns on the island's communication frequency. He hears_agent_ and _MI6, _before he's on his feet, Sig Sauer 1911 in hand.

The courtyard is a disaster area, even disregarding the remaining building debris, and in the middle of all of it none other than James Bond.

"Ah, ah, ah! No!" He yells at Bond, who has his Walther trained on another of his men. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hire decent help? You are here for me, yes? So stop shooting those in my employ."

Silva crosses the expanse quickly but stops to nudge a body with his foot as he passes. He can't stop the soft sound that comes from low in his throat.

"Tomorrow was Kavit's birthday." He turns his gaze on Bond, who looks distinctly uncomfortable.

"See what you've done?" Silva asks, motioning at James with a flighty hand. "Everything you touch dies."

It's meant as a joke, but the truth rings through and the line falls flat.

"You don't seem to be dead." Bond throws back, still holding his weapon like it will protect him if Silva wants to try anything. His faith in the small gun is cute, if unrealistic.

"Not for lack of trying, hmm? Well if you are here to kill me, we might as well have a drink first." He turns on his heel, striding back to his personal residence as smoothly as he can with his back spasming at the movement. After a moment he hears a second set of feet behind him.

Silva smiles to himself.

* * *

They sit in silence for far too long. Bond sipping at his tea while Silva cradles his own cup, each assessing the other with fierce intensity.

Silva cracks first, not because this was ever a competition but because he's hungry and James has the tea cakes.

"Would you?" He motions to the tray and Bond reacts suddenly, reaching for his gun on instinct. Silva sighs, a great huff of breath, and brings a hand to his face to rub hard at his eyes.

"Put the gun away, James."

The agent slowly holsters his Walther, looking sheepish.

"The things I deal with," Silva sighs in exasperation, motioning at Bond with a stirring spoon. "You used to be housebroken."

James looks down at his drink and stays silent, clearly trying to formulate a response.

"I need not remind you that if you discharge a weapon at me, I will return the favor." The threat comes out dirtier than intended and he immediatley feels like a fool.

"You've redecorated." Bond says lamely, motioning around the room once home to Silva's mainframe and cooling system, where metal once stood there is now lush green. Valencia roses and red carnations interspersed among half-grown fruit and nut trees.

"MI6's little assault took out a portion of the roof and left something to be desired, so here we are."

Silva sees James' eyes linger on a weak sapling occupying a conspicuously large plot of ground and sighs.

"My Bedana Pomegranate. Or what's left of it."

Bond nods absently and continues to look at the tree, expression softening slightly.

"Why are you here?" Silva asks gently, in a tone far softer than his counterpart rightly deserves. "I assumed your little ultimatum extended to the both of us."

"I'm not here to kill you, if that's what you think." James replies at last, meeting Silva's gaze across the table. "I received your gift."

"Ah," He nods in recognition. "The Dalmore."

"You know me too well."

"I always thought so."

"You were in my flat." Bond continues

Silva sips his tea and smiles indulgently.

"Mmm, not me. One of my associates."

"And somehow that is so much worse."

Silva hums in agreement and the silence is back, settling over them like a toxic cloud. Bond picks at a spot of peeling varnish on the table.

"Perhaps," Bond starts, looking anywhere but at Silva, "we should rethink our arrangement."

He waves a hand to dismiss the guards. The men look recalcitrant, understandably wary of Bond, but do as instructed.

When they are alone Silva rests his cup on the delicately inked china saucer and moves to stand, slowly, given the ache in his spine, and motions for James to follow him.

"This is a conversation best had in a more comfortable setting, I think."

Bond doesn't disagree and follows him to the elevator, now not nearly as accessible as it had once been.

"Did you ever meet your predecessor, James? The last 007?"

He doesn't respond, which is fine because Silva already knows the answer.

"_My_ predecessor, oof. The man died in a clown costume, but yours? A phenomenal agent."

Bond looks at him oddly, but doesn't respond, following him still along the path Silva has carved through the neatly trimmed gardens.

"Fantastic sense of humor, that one. I had the pleasure of working with him a few times in Southeast Asia before M had her little change of heart. Handsome, witty, toppled dictators like bowling pins, he was the kind of agent I should have been traded for."

The elevator doors slide open unheralded, and Silva holds an arm out for James to enter.

"Do you know where he is now?"

"I'd assume he's dead. Given that I bear his title." He sounds unimpressed, but the twinge of curiosity in his voice is tangible enough that Silva can only smile.

"Truth will out, C_orazón._ He grew old, so they found a replacement," He looks pointedly at Bond, "and they put one behind his ear."

"Double-0s don't have families. They don't have friends. They barely even have names. We are expandable for the very reason we are valuable."

"What is your point?"

"My point, darling, is that you come from a long line of great men that you will never know and the world will never remember. Someday very soon, sooner than you think, one of the nameless faces you pass everyday will become you; just as feared, just as respected, just as expendable."

His fingers dance across his thigh, tapping in a rhythm as erratic as his thoughts.

"I lost a great deal in China, James, not the least of which was my sanity. I am no fool, and I harbor no illusions about what I have become in the years since. I have harmed you in ways I once thought unfathomable, and I will continue to do so as long as we remain the men we are. The path we are on leads to ruin, but I care for you deeply and I would prefer it if we spent what little time we have left, together."

James doesn't respond, and when the lift doors open to his personal quarters Silva is convinced this will be the true, unquestioned end of whatever existed between the two of them. But no such revelation comes and Bond slides past him, exiting before Silva has a chance to move.

"I told you once, a very long time ago, that you were the only man that understood me. I believed that."

James turns slightly, looking back mournfully, and Silva can see Bond clutching the Walther beneath his jacket.

"Even after everything you've destroyed, the lives you've ruined and the people you've killed, you are the only man I will ever know that understands the complete -" Bond struggles to find the right word and lacking gives up, turning away.

There's a tightness in Silva's throat that he refuses to acknowledge. Something has broken James. He is man enough to admit this is likely his own doing.

"The one constant in my life is that I am alone. Completely and utterly and that fact will never change."

Bond's teeth clench and his lower lip quivers and he looks so _angry_ when he meets Silva's eyes.

"We are cursed with the same malady, Tiago, and I do think you've infected me."

Silva closes the gap between them with two steps and takes Bond into his arms.

James fists his hands in Silva's suit jacket and presses his face hard to the man's chest, snarling wetly, "I hate you so much I can't _breathe_."

Silva nudges James toward the bed, intentions for once completely innocent.

"I felt the same way for a long time, James. I'd be worried if you did not despise me."

* * *

They sit together in silence for the better part of an hour before Silva finds himself pressed bodily into the duvet, braced between Bond's thighs. The agent leans in close to trace Silva's lips with calloused fingers, no doubt feeling the unnatural presence of plastic and metal beneath the deceptively soft skin.

He doesn't miss the way James' own cheek muscle spasms at the contact; Bond's quaint version of flinching.

A lesser man would take offense.

"Is it so terrible, Mister Bond? My _condition_?"

James frowns at the question, but continues on to trace the firm ridges of Silva's cheek.

"Take it out." James commands softly, reeling back and dropping his hand to his side.

"So you can stare a little longer, hmm?" He chides lightly. James makes a pinched face and the scowl is back. The look is mildly irritating and Silva grabs James' arm to flip their positions; Bond snarls but doesn't fight him. Instead James shifts and throws a leg over Silva's hip, holding the man in place so they're face to face; his hand twisting in Silva's hair, forcing his head back while James' fingers probe his mouth, grazing over the scarred flesh of his tongue.

"I want to see what you did to yourself. This time without the whole of MI6 watching."

There's something horribly intimate about the action, but he doesn't want to dwell on the thought too long and he bites down hard. Bond doesn't recoil as expected and Silva simply bats the man's fingers away. Bond falls back and watches him with calculating blue eyes.

It's a look he's seen before, one that came at great personal cost.

He removes the prosthesis slowly and does not relish the all too familiar sensation of his face collapsing in on itself. He presents the offending item to James but the agent does not look away from the gaping maw that is Silva's mouth.

"Now the outside matches the inside." James says blandly, though his eyes betray emotion that Silva long ago lost the ability to identify.

Instead Silva clasps a hand to James' cheek, feeling the strong muscle and bone beneath in a parody of the motions 007 had gone through only minutes before.

"I am what is left of me." He rasps, refusing to break his gaze. Without the implant his voice is almost nonexistent, and he's mildly surprised that he can force out the words at all.

James scowls at the reply and crawls out from beneath Silva before reaching for the prosthesis; plucking the item from Silva's hand with deft fingers to examine it closely. James' gaze traces the polished white porcelain of the false teeth, the delicate wiring that allows him to speak fluidly, the metal and resin and rubber that has replaced so much bone and muscle tissue.

"What kind of man would I be if I discarded those I cared for solely on appearance?" James languishes.

They both laugh at the statement - Silva's contribution significantly less pleasing to the ear - and James continues to turn the implant over in his hand, the skin of his palm shining wet with saliva. He finishes and sets the prosthesis aside to put damp fingers to Tiago's cheek, prodding at the limp flesh.

"Women are one thing, but I like my men like I like my martinis." James continues, voice firm and hands steady.

"Shaken?"

"Bruised. The finest liquor in all the world? Even better after it's been tossed around a bit."

The sound that rises from Raoul's chest is not entirely voluntary as James moves up to capture his unsightly mouth in a rough kiss. In response he can only push forward for traction, the paralyzed jaw muscles accomplishing little without the implant. He laces his fingers through James' short hair and feels a pressure along the inside of his mouth. He realizes lamely that it's James' tongue. He grimaces at that, knowing his lover's efforts cannot be reciprocated.

James finally pulls away, and they're both panting. Silva forces out the words that have colored this encounter from the start, the oily sick doubt that brings him right back to Guangdong.

"Proves nothing...only that...you can stomach...putting your lips...to mine."

James looks affronted and grabs Silva's hand roughly, shoving it between their flush bodies to palm the erection straining beneath the agent's briefs.

"Years I spent mourning you," James bites, bucking into the hand. "Time I spent wondering what had happened to you, wondering if there was something I could have done to keep you from leaving the flat that morning, from going to Section H at all,"

James rolls his hips roughly and meets Silva's growing arousal.

"After everything you've done, everything that's been done _to you,_ your scars are hardly what will turn me away. Your psychosis, perhaps, but not your appearance, _rough as it may be_."

James grabs at Silva's face, hissing "_Tiago"_, before pulling him down for another less than perfect kiss.

"Missed you, _Corazón_." He rasps when they part again, this time holding the agent at bay with a firm hand.

He appreciates the effort James has made at accepting his 'condition', he truly does, but he's spent good money to no longer look like a sideshow attraction.

James behaves himself and watches intently as he clicks the implant back into place and stretches his jaw, rubbing at the tight muscles to gain back his range of motion.

"There. Much better, wouldn't you say?"

"Well," James drawls. "It is something."

He can still feel Bond's hard cock and smiles to himself, victorious.

"Shall we continue?"

James only grins in response.

After that it's just mindless rutting.

He doesn't even make it out of his pants before James comes with a shudder, the tip of his cock smearing opaque white across Silva's expertly tailored Ermenegildo Zegna trousers.

James rests his head on Silva's shoulder and fumbles with the zip, but Tiago gently bats the hand away. The suit is ruined and he's still achingly hard, but he doesn't care. He wants to cherish this feeling, his _Corazón _sated and disheveled in his arms; he brings a hand up to cradle James' head to the crook of his shoulder and turns to press a kiss to the strip of skin below the agent's ear.

James doesn't move, but Silva can feel the soft bite of stubble where the man is trying to reciprocate the affectionate gesture.

Silva shivers pleasantly and realizes he's climaxed.

It's the best sex he's had in fifteen years, and he's still fully clothed.

* * *

"The cyanide burned through your lower mandible." James says starkly from where he lies disheveled beside Silva.

"Yes?"

"It destroyed the soft tissue on the left half of your face and neck, scarred your vocal cords and likely did irreparable damage to your internal organs, yet your tongue and voice remain intact."

"Purely cosmetic, I assure you." He pokes the tip of his tongue out from between his lips and wiggles the muscle at his companion before continuing. "Completely functional, but I can't taste a thing. Never will again."

James tenses and Silva can only assume the man looks stricken, so he laces their fingers deftly.

"And your voice?"

"Not all of these scars came from my time with the Chinese. Many came after. I have spent, and continue to spend, a great deal of the commonwealth's money on surgery."

"You always were too proud for your own good."

"James, darling, I had no face. For almost five years I walked this earth looking as though I had been skinned and left to rot in the sun. I could not get people to believe I was a human, let alone an expatriate."

"How did you convince people to help you?"

Silva can't stop the look of incredulity that settles over his features.

"I threatened them, of course."

James huffs a humorless laugh and Silva has to smile.

* * *

It's easy after that. James starts talking and doesn't stop.

"I order my drink, don't give it a second thought, halfway through the second hand my vision begins to blur, damn thing had been poisoned. Le Chiffre is just watching me with that sadistic little grin on his face, you know the one, and I am literally about to die-"

Silva listens to every word, absorbing even the most insignificant of details.

This is what he's missed. This is the man his lover has become in his abscence.

"I think I loved her." James presses his face into Silva's throat, lips whisper soft against rough skin.

"I know you did, James."

* * *

James is beside him, fast asleep, spread across the bedsheets like an offering and Silva has difficulty identifying if this moment is real or imagined.

"_Corazón_." He says softly, looking for any kind of response. "James?"

Bond grunts and rolls away from the sound, and a low snuffling comes from where the agent has buried his face in a pillow. Silva places a hand to his chest, throat suddenly tight.

"Ah, he snores."

He'd forgotten the little sounds James only made when he was convinced he was safe wherever he was sleeping.

He could cry.


	9. Chapter 9

"I'm going away for a little while. To get my house in order, you understand."

"Do try not to die this time."

* * *

This is how they leave each other, with deceptively soft kisses and heavy hearts, because what they have can't exist in a world where Raoul Silva is a dead man and James Bond his killer.

They don't make promises, they don't make plans.

James returns to London and MI6 and Silva uproots his operation.

Literally in many aspects, spending a small fortune to transport his garden halfway across the world.

He changes his hair color to an inconspicuous black-brown that makes him feel more inhuman, if that's even possible at this point, and sets up a new life in Monaco; where the fair weather will do wonders for his plants and the _bourgeois _will not question the means by which he's come to his obscene wealth.

If James happens to pass through the area with surprising frequency, well, some things are just meant to be.

* * *

It's not long at all before Silva begins to feel the oily black creep of madness. This is nothing new.

Tiago knows he's insane in the same way he knows the sun rises in the east - like how a child knows of simple truths but cannot fathom the reasoning behind.

He also knows that whatever part of him died in Guangdong was reborn at Skyfall, but he cannot trust his own thoughts.

Every day away from James is a day where he is without purpose or direction.

It's physically painful but a necessary evil. The world is no longer his to do with as he pleases; there are consequences now, for the both of them.

If James will be the death of him one day, he can only hope. Until then he will wait for those brief moments where their paths cross in obscure countries and opulent hotels.

* * *

Halfway around the world an alert notification appears on a computer screen in St. Tropez.

Silva glances at the monitor and leans back in his seat, small plate of tasteless _oeufs en cocotte_ temporary forgotten.

"What have you gotten yourself into this time, my love?"

The answer is, unsurprisingly, a great deal of trouble.

* * *

007 goes missing on a Thursday.

Q branch turns over every North African lead they can find. There's no word, and no result after three weeks. M pulls resources and Bond's file lists_Missing in Action_ once more.

"You were supposed to keep an eye on him."

"He's 007, 'keep an eye on him' is about as legitimate a demand as ordering me to successfully breed a mythical creature."

Silva stares at the man on the monitor, his gaze unflinching, and the other relents.

"I have his last reported coordinates, but that is all we were able to recover."

"Good boy. I won't have to kill you now."

"One can only hope."

"I have no time for your lip. I want you to find who betrayed us, and I want their _skin_."

"Of course, sir."

Before the connection is terminated, Silva catches a second voice muttering, "...help us all if Bond's actually dead..."

* * *

The coordinates lead to a small island off the Moroccan coast.

He nearly blacks out, his rage is so intense.

He tries to meditate, to calm himself before the coming storm, but when his eyes slip shut all he can see is red.

"Get me a team, immediately."

The orders go through and within hours he has twenty ex-military men of questionable moral standing unwaveringly loyal to Silva's Swiss accounts.

There's not much time. Not with _Him_.

* * *

James Bond wakes, not in a hospital bed, but in a flat overlooking the Thames and it takes him a moment to realize why the view is familiar.

He's been here before and just looking over the London skyline recalls memories of sleepless nights and broken promises.

"Not too jarring, I hope?"

He rolls to face the speaker and immediately regrets the decision, his body screaming at him.

"How...?"

"I've had a few of my worker bees keeping a close watch on you." Tiago says playfully, grabbing at James' hands to re-bandage his wrists.

"You mean MI6." James corrects, the words clumsy around the healing cuts on his lips and he tries not to cringe as his jaw pulls at the raw flesh. Something distant tells him his wounds should hurt more than this.

"MI6 and a certain double-0."

They did something to his mouth, he shouldn't be able to speak, but the thought vanishes as quickly as it had come when Tiago wraps him in an obnoxiously fluffy white robe and slowly guides him into the hallway.

"So, then, who's your mole?" He finally asks, annoyed by how unsteady his legs are.

"You really expect me to surrender my embedded operatives? James, I am no M."

Tiago laughs at his own joke and continues to lead Bond through the opulently furnished townhouse, the man's steady hand pleasantly warm on the small of James' back.

"I take care of my own. Unless they fail me, of course."

James can see the glint of stainless steel and realizes suddenly they're heading to the kitchen when Tiago stops abruptly and turns to him, his hands coming up to frame James' face, careful of the healing wounds.

"Would you like to meet one of my other darlings? Of course you do, but do not be jealous, he's not as irreplaceable as you."

Tiago leans in to press a chaste kiss to James' lips before striding into the sunlit room. Bond can do nothing but follow behind, using a weak hand to brace himself along the wall.

His curiosity has the better of him.

* * *

"No."

The denial slips out before James can stop it.

"Yes! Can you believe I found him in a boys home in Essex? Poor thing could barely string together two lines of code, but look at him now!"

Tiago pulls a chair out for James before sliding into a seat himself, throwing an arm around the young man seated at the sun nook. He spares an impartial look to the impressive spread of breakfast foods littering the large table.

"Isn't he precious?"

Silva presses a kiss to the young man's shaggy head and smiles broadly.

Bond sighs and rubs his eyes tiredly.

"Q."

"007."

* * *

Silva slides a mug toward James with a bright smile, only a sliver of pale scar tissue peeking out above the ridge of the man's false pink gums.

"Ah, I forget. You two know each other." His tone of voice implies he hasn't really forgotten anything.

"Obviously not as well as previously thought." James drawls lowly

"Do you need something stronger in your tea, 007? I've heard you can't function these days before you've ingested an unspecified amount of hard liquor." Q says affably, though his gaze remains challenging.

Silva shoos James' hand away from the champagne and shoots the Quartermaster a withering look. He sighs dramatically but doesn't remove his hand from the flute, pushing it instead across the table top, away from James.

"Breakfast first. I don't know how you've survived these past years on booze and women alone."

Q smirks victoriously and something twists in James' gut.

It might just be envy.

At lease until Tiago cuffs Q hard around the back of the head with a snarled, "_Behave_."

It's not envy anymore.

It's fear.

* * *

Tiago had long since left them alone together to 'take a call'. The tension is cloying.

"Aren't you worried he might kill you?"

Q looks up from where he's scribbling furiously onto a pad of paper, numbers and figures that Bond can't place at this angle. He does, however, catch a series of words written in the margin: _Skyfall, awake, Quantum?_

"If you're referring to the business with Sévérine, I'm not a hired gun and I'm not a whore. I believe my position is secure."

Q's lilting tone bring him back to the present.

"_Unless you fail me again!_" A voice sing-songs from the study and James' lips quirk into a half smile involuntarily. Q only huffs a breath and pops a raspberry from the fruit bowl into his mouth. Lifting an eyebrow at Bond as if to convey, 'see what I have to deal with?'

"He recruited you?"

"Something like that. Details aren't important."

James questions the hesitation in Q's voice, but doesn't press.

"So, MI6?"

"A long-con. Before this it was a telecom in Belize and before that a finance firm in Switzerland, all planned and executed by your dearest out there."

"Ah."

Something is wrong with the timeline, but he can't place what it is.

"Quite."

"Nonetheless, I'm a bit concerned he'll try to kill _me_ at some point."

"You really shouldn't be. He cares for you, as much as I think he's able." Q tosses back, eyes oddly bright behind his glasses.

"Somehow I doubt that what he feels is love. Just the remnants of an obsession."

The words slip out of his mouth unchecked and James is floored by his own honesty. Q looks completely unsurprised by the confession.

"And that is what he is able to feel. Silva's spent years constructing this image of you in his mind," Q emphasizes his point by outlining James' figure in the air with his pen, "and now he finally has you. So everything is, shall we say, readjusting, to fall in line with the reality of the man you've become in his absence."

"You call him Silva, still? Even after everything?"

"That's his _name_. You think he lets anyone else call him Tiago?"

Q flips the leather bound notepad shut and scoots sideways off of the bench seat, the act serving no purpose but to remind James of how young MI6's Quartermaster truly is.

"Raoul Silva may have had a change of heart regarding MI6 and mindless revenge schemes, but a criminal empire is not upended in a day, even if the man in charge desires such a thing."

"And he doesn't desire it?"

"What do you think awaits that man in a world where he does not hold every card in duplicate? The answer used to be 'James Bond', now it is simply 'death'. Can you honestly see him retiring to a tropical island somewhere, like he fantasizes about so readily?"

Q shakes his head in a motion that James has come to associate with one convincing themselves of their own argument.

"A dozen nations would lock him in a cell for the rest of his life, countless more would execute him outright; that includes England."

It's a legitimate point, James is slightly ashamed he didn't realize it sooner.

"So, what, was I simply a prize to be won?"

"M was the game, and you weren't _a_ prize, you were _the_ prize. Nothing simple about it." Q grabs his mug from where if rests in front of Bond. "He was just as angry about what was done to him as he was about the potentiality of what MI6 _might _do to you."

"You have a great deal to live up to, 007." Q intones discerningly, jostling the notepad slightly trying to refill his mug. James reaches out to steady the pot, forgetting his bandaged hands, and Q looks at him with something akin to respect.

"Q?"

The younger man stares with undisguised curiosity.

"Yes, 007?"

"What _is_ your real name?"

Q just grins, teeth bright and eyes troubling.

"That's none of your concern. Not yet, at least."

James reflexively rubs his eyes in frustration and immediately regrets the decision, muscles in his hands protesting the movement.

"Now that we have all that sorted out, maybe you will find the time to wake up and smell the regret, hmm?" Q asks and turns away, cup dripping specks of rusty brown across the tile.

"Good day, Mister Bond."

James is suddenly very tired.

* * *

He doesn't know how much time passes after Q departs before he finds himself exploring the flat with undisguised interest. The pantry is filled with his favorite foods. The drawers are filled with his clothes. The washroom with his choice toiletries.

He takes his time peeling away the soiled bandages on his chest and thigh, examining the half-healed wounds thoroughly before limping into the shower stall to wash away the sticky-stale sweat and dried blood.

He blinks and Tiago is there, watching him with undisguised interest beneath a fringe of bleached-blonde hair, but the leering is nothing sexual.

"Are you alright to be on your own, darling?"

James can only snort at the question, even as his legs tremble with the continued effort of standing, and Tiago purses his lips in displeasure and turns away, leaving him alone once more.

Something about the action feels wrong, but James ignores the nagging doubt and lets his eyes slip shut beneath the gently pulsing stream of water.

He hears sirens from the street below.

He forgets that Tiago soundproofed the walls years ago.

He hears sirens.

* * *

When James exits the bath, he finds Tiago lounging lengthwise on the couch in a pair of jeans and one of James' old MI6 sweatshirts that he had felt too obvious to ever actually wear in public.

Tiago must hear the wheels turning, because he looks up from where he's furiously typing away on a military grade laptop that has come from god-knows-where with a questioning gaze.

"You would think an intelligence agency would not be so obvious." James says lightly, limping to the kitchen and pulling on a black sweater - the loose knit catching on his damp skin.

When he looks back Tiago is tugging lightly at the fabric of his own top, distorting the print of the crest.

"How did you get my things here?"

It seems as good a question as any.

"Nevermind that," Tiago waves a dismissive hand before motioning back to his sweatshirt. "Tell me, this was a gift from...?"

"Q branch. 2008."

"Oof. What did you destroy that year?"

James puts the kettle on the stove and gestures at Tiago with a tea bag. The man nods absently and returns to his work.

"It was an Aston."

Tiago clucks his tongue at the answer, the sound mixing in with the clicking of computer keys.

"Always with the Aston Martins, James, and you are furious with me for destroying one little car. I would not be surprised to hear that MI6 singlehandedly keeps the manufacturer afloat."

James makes a face at him and Tiago just smiles.

"James, you are safe here, you can tell me the truth. How many cars did you actually ruin?"

"...three."

"You are lucky you got a jogging suit and not a bullet!" Tiago chortles, clasping his hands together joyously.

James has a difficult time reconciling this man, his Tiago, with M's killer, but the kettle begins to whistle and James can only smile softly to himself when he hears _'five sugars' _ called out from across the room.

"Well, it looks better on you than it ever did me."

He walks back to the couch and sets the tea on the table, falling onto the cushions with a soft groan.

His wounds don't ache as much since the shower.

Tiago sets the computer aside and lets his legs fall wide, reaching to pull James flush against him, and the former 009 runs a hand through James' hair soothingly, humming with contentment.

"I assure you, my gifts will be horribly conspicuous. You won't be able to go out in public ever again."

James remembers suddenly the overly expensive liquor he'd left in his own flat however many weeks ago.

"The Dalmore was a start. What were you thinking, giving me a bottle of scotch I could never open? It's a bloody torture."

James feels Tiago press a kiss to his hair and smiles.

"It was a gesture." The man says deftly. "Something you would not use to drink away the past or dispose of out of spite. Something that you would keep forever and would remind you of me always."

"You were always too sentimental for your own good."

"I also wanted to show you how wealthy I really am. Nothing says that better than a hundred thousand pound scotch."

"And there he is. What's next? Platinum handcuffs? A diamond studded cock-ring?"

"Interrogation techniques aside, I am not nearly so adventurous. We should open it. Together."

"You just want to taste it." James immediately balks at his his own words, but Tiago only squeezes him tighter.

"None of that. I can always just blackmail the distillery into bottling another one. Besides, I already know what it tastes like, _Corazón_. I want to share that experience with you."

"Christ. I don't know if you're completely mental or just being romantic."

Tiago's chest vibrates with quiet laughter.

"I think it would be best to assume both."

James presses his cheek to Tiago's chest and breathes slowly.

In and out. In.

And out.

In, and -

_Out!_

_Get out now!_

When he opens his eyes again he is not greeted by soft hands or the morning sun.

* * *

Silva cuts through a small contingent of guards and opens a door on a sight he'd hoped to never look upon again.

Bond looks up at him, tired and bloody from where he's chained to the ceiling, arms pulled taught and Silva can't breathe.

The sickly-sweet stench of burnt flesh and urine is too much and he can no longer see James, only himself strung up in the same position.

He doesn't know how much time has passed when he comes back to himself, but he can see one pale blue eye watching him tiredly, the other swollen shut.

"Darling, we must stop meeting like this," Silva says finally when he can find his voice again, and James drops his head in defeat.

"Ah, ah, none of that," he continues, moving to cut Bond down. "No death today."

"...so long?" James' voice is nonexistent, made soft by exhaustion and blood loss.

"Arrogance, I'm afraid. Not on my part, though, for once."

"T-t," Bond tries to speak again, adam's apple bobbing as he attempts to choke out a response, but Silva shushes him gently, seeing how painful the action is.

"All in good time, darling."

The chains let loose and James falls into his arms, naked and bloody. Silva lowers them both to the grimy concrete with the utmost care, cradling his lover's broken body to his chest.

"See, I came for you," Silva whispers, more for his own benefit than Bond's, as his own men rush the cell, medic in tow. Silva grips Bond's limp hand and squeezes lightly, feeling for a brief moment like the man James Bond fell in love with all those years ago.

"I'll always come for you."

A weak hand squeezes back.

* * *

"You took something that belongs to me."

"I can assure you, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Let's not play this game."

"Oh, Tiago, _let's_. It's quaint, how you still pretend to be above all us mere mortals, but I have found something you can't protect. Maybe next time I'll make him look like you, yes? Let us see how much you still care for your lover when he has no face."

"_Blofeld_." He snarls at the video feed.

"_Silva_." Comes the equally cold response.


End file.
